Useful vs. Unnecessary Constraints

The
Unlimited Universe

What if you could do, have, or be whatever you want or
imagine? What if nothing held you back? What if you had unlimited superpowers
in a world of infinite resources?

Answering those questions can provide you with some clarity
as to the type of life you’d like to live (well, of anything else you might
want). However, that desire can’t turn from non-physical thought into part of
physical reality in an instant. Instead, realizing that desire requires effort,
some extent of planning, and time.

As physical beings, we are not all-powerful. We can’t bring
any crazed fantasy to life with a snap of our fingers.

Instead, in our physical world, there are constraints. “Constraints” is another
word for limits. Limits define the finiteness
of a certain entity.

Constraints make the physical world what it is. Finiteness
is a necessary element of physical reality. Nothing in the physical world is
without end—everything eventually stops, runs out, or reaches a point where it
can grow no more. Everything exists in certain limited quantities. You can
count on nothing lasting forever: everything is limited.

Absolute
and Relative Limits

Limits may sound evil. Surely they are to blame for keeping
us from certain peace and happiness. Without limits there would be no need to
fight for resources because everyone would always have enough. However, because
there perpetually is not enough, humanity
is doomed to be not only at war, but fundamentally discontent, forever—right?

Sure. That sure can be the case.

Does it have to be? Of course not. Answer me this: how often
has humanity come up against true, absolute
limits? Where have we collectively reached a point where we can literally
do and innovate no more?

I know, the questions are vague. That’s because it’s hard to
say what an absolute limit is. You face relative limits on a regular basis.
Based on your income, you can spend only so much money in a week. Based on how
long you sleep, you have only so many waking hours in a day (probably about
16-18 hours). You only have as many days off from school or work in a year as
your overlords allow you.

But what about absolute limits? Have you ever paid witness
to the complete depletion of a resource, such as a certain mineral? Do you
think people have run and swam as far and as fast as they ever will? Is our
technology is advanced as it ever will be? Do humans know all there is to
possibly know?

Of course not. Heck, with those last two, we’re just getting
started!

Many limits are hard to pinpoint. We don’t know where the
universe ends, how skilled a human can be, or how capable technology can
become. Relatively speaking, these things are changing all the time. The
universe is constantly expanding. Each generation gains access to more
knowledge than the last. The hottest technology goes obsolete every time you
turn around. If there are limits on how far these things can go, clearly we
haven’t even come close yet, as growth is constant and rapid.

Limits still have their place, of course. We can innovate
and learn only so fast. The dimension of time itself is the greatest limit of
all, as it provides us with the perception of speed, effort, failure, success,
growth, and change. Without time, no other limits would be possible.

Limits are
Usually Unnecessary

Still, even as individuals, bumping up against absolute
limits is rare. Are you certain that you have ever run as fast as your body was
physically capable of taking you for a certain distance? Have you reached the
peak level of physical fitness possible for yourself? Have you contributed as
much as is possible for a single human being in one lifetime?

I’ve run several hundred races over the last 7 years, and my
answer to the first question is still a definite no. There were about two or three races where I felt that I came
very close to running as fast as I possibly could at my fitness level at the
time. But it’s so hard to be sure. It’s very
likely that I unnecessarily limited myself somehow, even if it was just one
half-assed step.

Unnecessarily limiting oneself is a common condition among
humans—so common, in fact, it’s deserving of plague-status. This happens, in
fact, almost all the time. However, it’s so frequent that we’ve come to take
this germ of ours for granted.

What makes a limit “unnecessary” is that it not only is the
product of human choice—it also does nothing in helping you to realize your
desires.

Contrary to unnecessary limits are useful limits. Useful limits provide the physical world with order,
and encourage creativity, learning, and optimization without wasting time
(which is itself a useful limit).

The current abilities, qualities, and knowledge of humanity
(collectively)

Your beliefs

Unnecessary
Constraints:

Eating unhealthy foods

Being under- or malnourished

Being overweight

Lack of sleep

Inefficient sleep/spending too long trying to sleep

Lack of physical movement (exercise)

Lack of physical strength

Lack of overall physical fitness

Lack of training (i.e. physical and/or skill-based training)

Poor/lack of education

Lack of knowledge

Lack of money

Lack of certain qualities

Lack of clarity

Lack of technology and/or other equipment

Lack of people (i.e. lack of labor, lack of support)

Lack of discipline

Lack of creativity

Identifying with/limiting yourself to the possibility of
only one belief system

Addiction

Harmful and time-wasting habits

Being surrounded by the wrong people (i.e. negative, not
helpful, unsupportive)

Win the
Game by Changing the Constraints

Calling something a “constraint” doesn’t mean it can’t be
changed—even many of the useful ones. In essence, all a constraint refers to is the current state of things. Constraints
tell you a bit about what is and what is not possible right now, in addition to
what is and what is not likely to happen next, and that’s about it. Constraints
don’t inform you as to everything that
is both possible and impossible at this moment—at least, no single constraint
does.

In many situations, constraints leave you with plenty of
room for creativity, independent thought, and choice. Of course, your abilities
to be creative, to think critically, and to choose are constrained. But, the
limits of these abilities are constrained largely by other things, such as your
experiences and knowledge. Plus, from moment to moment the extent of these
constraints are under conscious control. This means that if you get stopped
short, it is only because of your choice not
to exercise more attention, focus, discipline, courage, heart-centeredness,
etc. In other words, a sense of being limited in exercising these abilities is
of your own doing—you are unnecessarily
limiting yourself.

Everything you do, every choice you make, and every
experience you’ve ever had is constrained somehow. Constraints are inescapable.
In your physical lifetime, you will never be presented with unlimited options.

However, more often than not, not only do you have more options
than you know what to do with-- there are options available to you which you
are unaware of to begin with. Your
options may be finite in number, but you have so many you could never possibly
explore them all. When you start to think about all the different choices you
could have made in your lifetime up to this point, you might even feel grateful
that you are constrained. Otherwise you might still be trying to decide on the
theme of your 1st birthday party—or what to study in college.

We are limited, but not nearly as much as we think we are.
We are limited, but we limit ourselves far more than is necessary.

When considering limits- the stopping point of things- you
also have to consider growth, which is the ability to transcend or work around
that stopping point. Your ability to think critically and independently limits
you differently now than it did 10 years ago. Let’s assume your thinking
abilities have improved over the last decade. In some ways, your improvement in
this ability will close off options to you. Options you would have considered
taking 10 years ago no longer seem viable to you: in this example, such options
would seem foolish or unwise to you. At the same time, your ability to think
critically opens up options to you which you did not have 10 years ago. In the past, you either couldn’t have
imagined such options as possible, or you couldn’t have figured out how to make
them work. Your increase in intelligence since then has opened up new possibilities
for you.

Take, for example, physical training. At the start of my
senior year of high school, my sixth year of running competitively, I slowed
down without apparent cause. I began to feel fatigued and in pain much of the
time—even when I wasn’t running. I struggled with this for most of the school
year, up until Outdoor Track rolled around in March. I didn’t get much faster
in the Spring, but I was coming off a month of rest after being injured, and I
had become more accepting of my apparent fate by that point.

In spite of this change in circumstances, I continued to
train as I always had (the constraints of an injury aside). Most weeks, this
involved doing 2-3 speed workouts per week. An example of a speed workout is to
run 1 lap around the track (.25 miles, or 400 meters) 8 times, at 90 seconds
per lap, and with 30 seconds of rest in between each lap. Four 90-second laps
will get you a 6 minute mile— a brisk pace no matter who you are; yet, for a
well-trained athlete, certainly not the fastest you can go (I’m well aware
there are people who laugh at the thought of a 90-second 400 being “brisk”).
The point of a speed workout is to go fast and to push yourself, but not to
expend quite as much energy as you would in a race.

By the start of Outdoor Track in my freshman year of
college, I began to seriously doubt whether speed workouts provided any benefit
to me. Barring my ultramarathon debut between the end of high school and the
start of college (over the Summer), I had made almost no improvements in the
last year and a half. Anything involving speed continued to be challenging for
me, and at practices and meets I usually finished near- or dead-last. This was
the first time I doubted the functionality of speed workouts- I had always
taken them for granted- and now it seemed like I had few options. Either I
could continue struggling through speed workouts and just barely scrape by to maintain my current abilities, or I could stop
doing them and slow down. For the rest of the schoolyear, I chose the former.

For about a month and a half after that year at college
ended, I ran very little. I was in a lot of pain and I didn’t want to make it
worse. In that time, I heard about a method of training that I had read a
little about several years earlier, yet didn’t totally understand.

This form of training is based on heartrate. The idea is
that when the heart beats within a certain range of rates, the body burns fat
for fuel. When that fat-burning range is exceeded, the body burns carbohydrates
instead. The other idea at play is that fat is a far more reliable,
sustainable, and abundant source of energy for the body than carbohydrates— in
fact, it’s almost endless.

What you’re supposed to do in training, then, is to always stay
within the fat-burning range. Always.
Don’t push it too hard.

It takes time, but over the course of months of doing this,
your aerobic threshold (the performance-level at which the body switches from
burning fat to burning carbs) increases. For a runner, this means that you can
run faster, yet your body still burns fat and you still feel relatively
relaxed. This is analogous to being able to lift heavier weights as you get
stronger. Thanks to training, the effort it takes to lift 50 pounds today is
the same amount of effort it took to lift 20 pounds a few months ago. (I say
that solely for the sake of comparison; this type of training might not make
sense for a weight-lifter).

For me, these ideas about training meant a lot of long, slow
distance runs (“LSD”) and no speed workouts. It also meant doing a fair amount
of walking on my runs- especially up hills-, and training at an average pace of
about 12 minutes per mile (5 miles per hour, or 8 kilometers per hour).

I don’t have a heart rate monitor, so rather than base my
training on heartrate I’ve based it on a certain level of effort (so it’s a
subjective judgment, rather than an objective one). The simplest way to
describe it is that I aim to always feel “basically comfortable.” I’m not
strolling along, but it doesn’t hurt, either.

At first, this was very difficult to come to terms with. I
felt like a wimp running so slow all the time and doing so much walking. I
stuck with it, though, because I was finally able to train while keeping
fatigue at bay. Plus, I had been struggling for so long, I figured I didn’t
have much to lose by trying something new.

6 months into training this way, things have been going
quite well—wonderfully, even. Indeed, there have been objective improvements. I
haven’t raced much, but the one 5K (3.1 miles) I ran was faster than every 5K I raced since I began
struggling in my senior year, except for one race early in college (even that
was only 4 seconds faster). In September, it took me 13 hours to complete a
50-mile run. In November, it took me just under 9 hours to complete a 40-mile
run (10 miles should not make a
4-hour difference—at least, not on the roads). In the Fall, it usually took me
100-105 minutes to complete the 9.25 mile run from my house to my sister’s
house. Yesterday, on Christmas, it took 90 minutes. I always do this run at a
pace that is “basically comfortable”—even yesterday I did.

The best form of comparison, of course, would be to go to a
track meet and run the same races I did in high school and college. Track races
aren’t my focus right now, but I’m looking to run at least one in the next few
months—and I’m confident that I’ll do better than I have been the last several
years.

And this is all without speed workouts! To make it even
better, I’ve certainly saved myself a lot of pain without those the last few
months, too. ;) (but I’m sure they’ll come back some day…)

Another important piece of the puzzle, of course, was
overcoming chronic pain. As you could imagine, it has been much easier to run
faster since I’ve stopped being in pain. You can read about how I did that in
this article: The Great Back Pain Myth. That article also demonstrates a
point I made earlier in this article, which is that increased knowledge and
critical thinking abilities opens up new options to you—options you previously
had no idea existed.

As with most topics related to physical health, I could
expand on and debate about this for eons, but the point is that you are only
limited by the options you believe you
have. Once you entertain the idea that there is an alternative in addition to
the two undesirable options you have, you might not come upon one right away,
but at last it is possible to relieve yourself of the burden of unnecessary
limitations.

Roadblock vs
Creative Challenge: A Matter of Perception

If you take a look at the lists again, you may notice that
some of the items seem to contradict one another. For example, on the list of
Useful Constraints, you’ll find “money”, “your current stash of knowledge”, and
“your current abilities”. On the list of Unnecessary Constraints, you’ll find “lack
of money,” “lack of knowledge,” and “lack of training” (which roughly equates
to, “lack of ability”).

It may sound like the items on the two list are one and the
same. If you don’t have a lot of money,
don’t you have to face up to a lack of money? Yes, you do. But, these lists
are largely a matter of perspective. If you have $5 in the bank, then you have
$5 in the bank. There’s no debating that. It is a matter of face. However,
whether that has to stop you from achieving your goals and desires and
fantasies of magic is a matter of choice.

Say you want to get a new laptop, for a simple example.
Money is indeed a constraint in this case. It determines whether you have the
option of going to a store, trading dollar bills for a laptop, and then
bringing that laptop home and calling it yours. If you have $5 in the bank,
that option is not available to you right now. But that doesn’t mean you can’t
get a laptop. If you believe you can’t get a laptop, you’re using a lack of
money as an unnecessary constraint on your ability to get a laptop. In reality,
it is still possible—you’ll just have to find another way is all. Of course, if
you don’t believe that there is another way, you’re unlikely to come upon one.

So, if you don’t have enough money, what can you do? Well,
you can go make some money. There are
a number of ways you can do that—get a job, buy and sell stocks, start a
business, become a con artist, steal the money, etc. Then you can use that
money to go buy the laptop, all by your little self. You have other options,
too. You can ask for a laptop as a Christmas gift (though, at the time of my
writing this, you’re a day late—sorry). You can ask someone to buy it for you
and promise to pay them back later. You can ask someone to buy it for you and
compensate them in some form that isn’t money, such as by offering to fix
something in their house (or, if you are without skill, you can offer your body—or
your hand in marriage). You can barter, and trade something you own for a
laptop. You can buy a used laptop and thus spend less money. You can take
someone’s dysfunctional laptop off their hands, fix it, and then keep it for
yourself.

The options are many, you see. You are indeed constrained—based
on your abilities, some of those options won’t be available to you (such as
that last one). But with time and effort, you can change the constraints and improve upon those abilities. You can
even see this desire to get a laptop as a call to get creative and use and
improve your skills. Maybe you can’t dish out sweet cash, but you can still
rise to the challenge. Let today’s constraints be tomorrow’s strengths.

Transcend
and Embrace

Lastly, take note that all of the constraints on both lists are subject to change. The
flexibility of some items, such as gravity, is more constrained than others, but they all have their holes and they all
have a little bit of wiggle room—even if it’s not much. Humans are always
pushing past what has constrained them by doing research, discovering new
knowledge (truths), altering their ideas, trying new things, and changing their
beliefs. What we believe to be possible is always in a state of flux. This
progress occurs on both a collective level and an individual level (that means
you!).

Indeed, personal growth itself is a game of changing
constraints. You get rid of the unnecessary limits which hold you back, and you
consciously select constraints that will help to keep you on your desired path.
You set healthy boundaries between your work and your personal life. You choose
one big goal to focus on, and you let that set the limits for how you spend
your time each day (watching cat videos on YouTube is not an option!). You bring the good stuff into your life and you
reject the bad, thereby constraining what you’ll put your attention on.

Keep both lists in mind, and notice the effects the items on
each have on your life. Re-title the second list as “Abuses of Power,” and
think about how you’ve been giving your power away to these things. Consider
how you could see certain situations differently, and make new choices which
either work around or push past the unnecessary constraints.

Then, look at the top list and let yourself feel grateful
for these things—especially the ones you cannot change (such as physical
death). They add elements of excitement and challenge, yet also just enough
stability to life, that they allow for you to create a compelling story.
When you look back on your fondest memories, greatest accomplishments, and
richest experiences, you will see these useful constraints somewhere in the
backdrop.

Yet, keep in mind that these, too, are not as solid and
static as you believe them to be. No constraint is forever, just as all
physical things eventually come to an end.